Can Wi-Fi track your heart rate?

Monitoring your heart rate is one of the simplest ways to keep tabs on your health, but to do it properly you typically have to wear a cumbersome and/or expensive device. A team at the University of California, Santa Cruz is hoping to change that with a new technology that can monitor your heart rate through your Wi-Fi.

Professor Katia Obraczka, postdoc student Nayan Sanjay Bhatia and high-school intern Pranay Kocheta teamed up to develop Pulse-Fi. “Pulse-Fi uses ordinary Wi-Fi signals to monitor your heartbeat without touching you. It captures tiny changes in the Wi-Fi signal waves caused by heartbeat,” said Obraczka.

The system filters background noise to isolate a heartbeat within a room by detecting changes in Wi-Fi signal amplitude. They then trained an AI model running on a simple device like a Raspberry Pi to estimate heart rate in real time based on those signals. In tests, the system had an error rate of less than 1.5 beats per minute, putting its accuracy level on par with other common heartbeat sensors. The next step is to make sure the technology can work when there are multiple persons, and therefore multiple heartbeats, in a room.